Westerly boys give up Halloween candy to fill empty bowl for other kids

As the Halloween season officially wraps up, the kindness of kids in Westerly who were out trick-or-treating will stick around for a while.

Halloween night, Kristen Wells said she left a bowl of candy outside.

In it, was about six bags worth of popular chocolates.

"I was taking our little ones to Mystic Village to do trick or treating so we put a bowl out with a sign, with a little rhyme on it for kids that were trick-or-treating in our neighborhood," said Wells. "Then, when we came home, it was dark. We were going in the house, I looked in the bowl [and] there were a few pieces. It wasn't any of the type of candy that we have, so I'm like confused like, 'How did this get here?'"

Ten-year-old Jackson Panciera, 10-year-old Jack Binger, and 11-year-old Andrew Kitchen had been trick-or-treating together in the Robin Hills area.

When they got to Well's home, they noticed the candy bowl was empty.

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"I saw the ring door bell and I was like, 'Oh, they must have saw the person who stole all the candy'," said Panciera.

"We walk up, none of us looked down at the bowl yet, we all just standing there reading the sign to ourselves and then we all looked down at the exact same time and we're like -- there was nothing," said Kitchen. "We started to walk away and then [Jack] says, 'You know, we should put some candy in there for other trick-or-treaters'."

Wells said she was curious as to how a different kind of candy wound up in her bowl, so she went back and reviewed the footage from her RING camera.

She saw lots of kids taking too much, but then something else caught her attention.

"So, I looked at our security camera footage to see what had happened -- it was so adorable," said Wells.

In the video, the three boys are seen walking up to her residence. They read the sign out loud and once they noticed there was no candy, they turned the bowl upside down.

After taking a few steps to head over to the next house, the group turns back. They then take candy from their own stash to fill the bowl.

"I was like, 'Guys, we should put in candy because there could be other trick-or-treaters that could come by," said Binger. "Honestly, we're all done with COVID and candy is the best thing we could do to help everyone."

"We didn't want them to be sad if they came around their first house [and there was] no candy," said Kitchen.

Wells said the day after Halloween, she had read many negative posts on Facebook in regard to trick-or-treaters, so she posted the video on social media to shine a positive light.

"It was just so sweet. I wanted to share it, especially because I had seen a lot of stories of not so nice things happen with people who left their bowls out and it was just a nice story" she said. "If my kids did that, I would want someone to tell me. It makes you feel good if your kids do something like that and that's why I wanted to find the parents when I posted it."

Wells was successful.

The post gained a lot of traction on social media and had been shared several times.

"Everyone was so happy to read such a nice story and what wonderful kids they were to come up with that idea," she said. "I was surprised to see that. I didn't expect to see that, especially without an adult with them. It was the kids who decided to do that on their own."

"It was just like this instinct we had like, 'Let's make someone's day if we can'," said Binger. "I was just super interested that just a small act like that blew up. I feel like it's a good thing of what we did so maybe people will look back on it and say, 'I want to do something like that next year'."